If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Except there is no mention of Image Quality. Maybe the DirectX looks twice as good. Who knows.

That was the first thing I thought of also. There have been benchmarks where drivers were detecting the benchmark and dropping frames or reducing image quality to increase FPS. There have been cases where some games were faster in Wine due to unimplemented graphics functions that either reduced the GPU load or caused the game engine to skip some DirectX features (I can't remember which). If the OpenGL version is producing the same output (on the screen) as the DirectX version then it's a win. Otherwise it's meaningless.

Great news. I always knew Linux had the potential for better gaming performance, because of its tweakability (you can tweak the OS so that very little background processes run, among other things)

Originally Posted by BO$$

As a side question. Why are people still programming for directx? It works only on windows. Program for opengl and you make your engine more portable from the start for if (actually when) you'll port it to linux. It's not like directx is so much easier than opengl.... brainwashed devs..

Mainly support from what I understand, and in general Direct3D seems to be leading the edge in terms of graphical power and things like that (they were the first to introduce geometry shaders), while OpenGL seems to be playing catch up. With DirectX, everything is in one nice little package provided by Microsoft, but OpenGL only comes with a graphics library, and no input/sound/video libraries, which DirectX provides. I also found the documentation of DirectX to be much better (i.e. all in one place) compared to the docs for OpenGL, which are all over the place (this is from my experience, and I am not a game developer so I could be inexperienced)

Also, I believe Microsoft did something during the Vista days to reduce the performance of OpenGL deliberately.. I think that switched a lot of developers to Direct3D, but I'm not sure.

I'd like to know more about this crunch that was mentioned in the comments of the page that Michael got this information from. It would be awesome if it is open and patent free and is able to solve the st3c problem.

This is what they said about the performance difference between direct x and open gl.

'This experience lead to the question: why does an OpenGL version of our game run faster than Direct3D on Windows 7? It appears that it’s not related to multitasking overhead. We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D.'

While MS has most surely "has it out" for OpenGL, and DirectX is designed as a developer sink-hole (as with most MS solutions), it's also a very good API, arguably better than OpenGL in many ways. Especially HLSL vs GLSL.
DirectX is a OOP design, which helps with error handling and creates easier-to-understand frameworks. That being said, OpenGL is just fine itself, and any programmer worth his salt should be able to use it to make games and applications. The reason it's fallen behind in recent years, is because Windows has been The gaming platform for awhile.. that's changing now with the markets focus on Tablets & Smart Phones which are largely OpenGLES driven. So OpenGL is making a comeback, and I hope Valve puts a lot of weight behind this, and the Linux Desktop to bring great graphics to the open technology world.

I think some people here are too quick to dish out harsh words to DirectX, credit where credit is due. That being said, I'm a big supporter or Open Source and I'm hoping OpenGL not only sees market increase, but also API improvement in the years to come.

Except there is no mention of Image Quality. Maybe the DirectX looks twice as good. Who knows.

Also, it's kind of shady of Phoronix talking about all this optimising of the Intel drivers, and how Linux gets 300+FPS, before finally sneaking in the note that the 300+FPS was Nvidia after many articles omitting this detail.

Finally, in reading the original blog post, it would have been interesting to see how many frames each of the three areas contributed to the improvement (6 FPS to 315 FPS).

They used same video card and same PC to make tests.

I can assure you that same settings in ETQW in Linux or in Windows , no matter Linux Distro, ends up with ETQW looking much better than in Windows be it XP or 7.

In fact, video playback also look better out of the box in Linux than in Windows XP or 7 with VLC with same settings.

I'd like to know more about this crunch that was mentioned in the comments of the page that Michael got this information from. It would be awesome if it is open and patent free and is able to solve the st3c problem.

I just spammed a Portuguese site (I'm Portuguese) that was talking about the Win8 entering in production....there was a flame war there against Win8 and i simply copy and pasted the info about L4D2 extra speed under Linux